A Congressional Research Service report.

In the consolidated cases of Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States, decided June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 opinion that aliens designated as enemy combatants and detained at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus. The Court also found that § 7 of the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which limited judicial review of executive determinations of the petitioners’ enemy combatant status, did not provide an adequate habeas substitute and therefore acted as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas. The immediate impact of the Boumediene decision is that detainees at Guantanamo may petition a federal district court for habeas review of the circumstances of their detention. This report summarizes the Boumediene decision and analyzes several of its major implications for the U.S. detention of alien enemy combatants and legislation that limits detainees’ access to judicial review.

Boumediene v. Bush: Guantanamo Detainees’ Right to Habeas Corpus

Finally, a real value proposition!

When it comes to user-generated content and interactivity, Al Qaeda is now behind the curve. And the United States can help to keep it there by encouraging the growth of freer, more empowered online communities, especially in the Arab-Islamic world.

Fighting Al Qaeda With YouTube

SHOOTING WAR began as a serialized web comic here on SMITHMAG.net in May 2006. What was to be a short online preview of the story expanded to 11 bi-weekly chapters as reader and media interest grew. Earlier this year, the web comic was nominated for an Eisner Award.

In the fall of 2006, the story was acquired by Grand Central Publishing (formerly Warner Books) for publication as a hardcover graphic novel in North America and in the U.K. by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Think of the web comic as a sort of beta version of the book. We ended up remastering every panel from the online version, reworking the storyline and the political context, some of which came as a result of suggestions from our loyal readers on this site. The full-color 192-page hardcover graphic novel takes the story to its dramatic conclusion and features over 110 pages of new material, including all new plots twists and, by popular demand, more Dan Rather than you can shake a dead armadillo at.

The original (unedited) web comic chapters can we viewed here.

The book earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

A scathing near-future satire of the Iraqi occupation that rings with eerie plausibility, this Web comic-to-print hardcover collection follows a cocky young journalist named Jimmy Burns, who finds himself video-blogging across the front lines of Iraq in the year 2011. An accidental Internet celebrity transplanted suddenly to the Baghdad battlefields, Jimmy quickly progresses from arrogant to regretful, then jaded—in short, he is America in Iraq.

As the world slowly disintegrates around him, Jimmy finds himself caught between the competing agendas of Muslim insurgents, the American military and a sensational cable news network as they all clamor for blood on the battlefields. Journalist and first-time graphic novelist Lappé takes obvious delight in skewering all three with a whip-smart, left-leaning indictment of both American media and foreign policy that offers little hope and fewer heroes.

The bleak prognostications are cut with black humor and a penchant for explosions that keep the narrative moving.

The collection adds 110 pages of new content to the Web version, and Goldman's art, a cinematic blend of photography and digital painting, is framed in widescreen panels that lend an air of video documentary to a grim graphic novel that manages to make media—and the truth—seem more fluid than ever.

Shooting War

After five years as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, I joined the Army because I wanted a challenge. I wanted adventure. Then I started basic training on September 11, 2001, and got more than I expected. After serving multiple tours in Iraq—patrolling city streets in the dead of night, hunting down insurgents, shooting at the enemy and being shot at—I will never be the same.

Soldier: Texas Monthly July 2008

How we learned to stop worrying and love surveillance

The Spy Who Blogged Me

Observing government surveillance of individual citizens from her perch in Quebec, human-rights lawyer Webb wonders how long democracy can survive when power-hungry officials are able to persecute innocent men and women as well as the occasional terrorist. Webb focuses her criticism on the governments of Canada and the United States, but persuasively documents international cooperation on illegal, or at least immoral, high-tech information gathering. Webb devotes substantial space to the National Security Agency of the U.S and its monitoring of international telephone traffic despite apparent lawlessness and ethical violations. Webb also writes in detail about how governments, following the lead of the Bush administration, use "terrorism" as an excuse to "serve agendas that go far beyond security from terrorism--namely the suppression of dissent, harsh immigration and refugee policies, increased law enforcement power," and the consolidation of political power within governments and in exerting control over national populations. Dense writing makes the book difficult to follow at times, and the alarmist tone is, well, alarming. But it does ring true.

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World

The author discusses several types of wars of ideas in an effort to achieve a better understanding of what wars of ideas are. That knowledge, in turn, can help inform strategy. It is important to note, for instance, that because ideas are interpreted subjectively, it is not likely that opposing parties will “win” each other over by means of an ideational campaign alone. Hence, physical events, whether intended or incidental, typically play determining roles in the ways wars of ideas unfold, and how (or whether) they are end. Thus, while the act of communicating strategically remains a vital part of any war of ideas, we need to manage our expectations as far as what it can accomplish.

Wars of Ideas and the War of Ideas

Did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

Some counterpoints to this 'theory':

Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers portrays the urban warfare between Algerians and the French troops occupying their country.

"How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas," read the flier.

Modern urban terrorism began in Algiers, and one result of that development was France's creation of a monstrous, chaotic, military apparatus of torture to use any means necessary to dismantle the terrorist cells. Did torture succeed in Algiers because the paras were dealing with a small population in a cordoned-off area?

One wonders.

Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian filmmaker who explored terrorism and torture in colonial Algeria in the powerful and influential 1965 classic, “The Battle of Algiers,” died here on Thursday. He was 86.

The parallels between the Algerian war and modern warfare are striking, and lessons can be extracted from French successes and failures in its drive to contain and manage the Algerian uprising.

RE: Was Grand Theft Auto IV Inspired by Al-Qaida?

Islamist forums are abuzz with a new theory: The designers of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, they say, were inspired by killing methods developed by al-Qaida. But did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

YouTube doesn't lie.

Was Grand Theft Auto IV Inspired by Al-Qaida?

The Europeans say that for them, the argument is not theoretical.

Al Qaeda threat has analysts split into 2 opposing camps